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Sun was eager to pay Keamy the twenty-five thousand dollars from her father, not knowing this was Keamy’s fee for “popping” Jin.

Karma hunted Sun:  in Island spacetime she shot a woman in the abdomen; in sideways spacetime it was Sun who was shot in the abdomen.

On the Island in 2004 Sun knew English but feigned ignorance; in present-day 2007 Sun professes understanding of English, but can do so only in Korean.

There were two packages tonight:  The first package recorded time, and the second package–bent time.

And even though Mikhail was not shot on the Odessa Steps of the Battleship Potemkin (Броненосец «Потёмкин»), he had to be Russian, and he had to be shot in the eye (Paul Edwards’ middle name, apparently, is Eisenstein).

Everything, even Sun’s reflection in the mirror, was just a little… off.  Ironies were thicker than weeds in Sun’s three-year-old garden.  By the end of the episode, thick storm clouds gathered.  People, places, and progression of events were predictable but precarious.  It was the unstable calm before the storm.  It was The Package.

The Sickness Revisited

Island Sayid feels no emotions.  “I don’t feel anything:  anger, happiness, pain.”  Sideways Sayid uses almost exactly the same words when he finds Jin in the walk-in refrigerator.  ”I don’t know why you’re here, and I don’t really care.”  In fact, not only are the words similar, but the facial expressions and the intonations are nearly identical.  Much has been made of the MIB turning Sayid into a “zombie”.  He is a shell of a man, without emotion, without feelings for himself or others.   We have seen this happen before:  Rousseau’s science team, Claire.  Many would like to place the blame for Zombie Sayid at the feet of the Smoke Monster.

Where, then, is the Smoke Monster in the sideways reality?  Is Keamy the stateside version of Smokey?  Should we blame Omar or Jin or the California sunshine for sideways Sayid’s apathy?  There is no Smoke Monster in California.  Jin, powering up the Dharma Initiative slideshow in Room Twenty-three discovered the answer.  It flashed from the projector at the front of the room:  “We are the causes of our own suffering.”

It was Sayid, not the Smoke Monster, who decided he didn’t care about Jin being bound and locked up in a cold refrigerator.  It was Sayid, not the Smoke Monster, who decided that the unlikely promise of seeing his Nadia again was sufficient justification to kill both Dogen and Lennon, thereby allowing the MIB free access to the Temple and unimpeded ability to wipe out the children, women, and men.  It was Sayid, not the Smoke Monster, who turned himself into an uncaring, unfeeling shell of a man.  The Sickness is not caused by the Smoke Monster.  We cause our own Sickness.  Inner darkness, apathy, self-centredness–all of these are human creations.

And yet something is not quite right here.  The discomfort of this evening was quite different from the disquiet of a week ago.  Last week it was the symbols and the explanations of those symbols that didn’t quite fit.  Tonight there were no misplaced symbols, but there were plenty of misplaced emotions and actions.  The characters all seemed to be progressing as one might expect them to proceed, but they were all a little… off.

Only hours before Sayid entered the restaurant with Keamy and Omar, he was reacting to the circumstance of his brother’s plight.  He cared for his brother and for his beloved Nadia.  She implored him not to do anything.  She knew what he was capable of, and she also knew from painful personal experience that violence could only beget more violence.  But his feelings, his deep emotional connection with his brother’s family, led Sayid to act in accord with training, experience, instinct, and will.  Commitment, conscience, caring guided his actions in the restaurant.  Even if he was misguided, he nevertheless engaged actively with the world.  He cared.

How then, only two or three hours later, could he say, “I don’t know why you’re here, and I don’t really care.”?

A Damned Godzilla Movie

Ben discovered Sun after her escape from the MIB, out cold and a big red bump on her forehead.  The only recognisably English word her lips would allow her to form was “Locke”.  She understood Ben’s questions, but she could formulate responses only in very rapid and animated Korean.

Later, as the sun began to set, Richard revealed his plan to everyone.  They had to do anything in their power to prevent the Man in Black from leaving the Island.  The Ajira plane was only lightly damaged, still carried plenty of fuel, and came to rest at the end of a smooth gravel runway.  It had to be destroyed.  Sun understood every word Richard said, and she gave him an earful–in Korean.  Richard, fluent in three languages (Latin, too, remember?), understood not a word.  If he had been culturally insensitive–or a racist, like Keamy–he might have turned to Miles and Lapidus at that point and said, grinning, “I feel like I’m in a damned Godzilla movie.”

Aphasia, Jack said.  Her language faculties would return, and in the meantime, she could communicate with pencil and paper, dashing off quick responses in English.  Things will return to normal, the good doctor said.  Everything will be fine.

The sea was in a tempest, the wind howled, the sky was angry with thick, dark clouds.  “Things will return to normal.  You’ll speak English again.  Everything will be fine.”  As they spoke, Sun’s fire was nearly snuffed out by wind and the coming rain.

Jack doesn’t know it, but the storm is only beginning.  The plane will never make it off the ground.  And Sun will never get her language skills back.  Everything is going to get worse, not better.

Across the waves, across time and space, in a California hotel, Jin and Sun understand Keamy, even if they have no familiarity with English.  They respond in rapid-fire Korean.  Keamy is not so versatile in his communications skills.  “I feel like I’m in a damned Godzilla movie,” he says, and then he tells Omar to “pick up that Arab.”  It doesn’t matter that Sayid is not an Arab, but Omar is.  Cultural sensitivity is not among the course offerings at Blackwater University, apparently.

Some of the reflections tonight were expected, even comforting.  Some were expected and almost over the top–like Mikhail Bakunin’s bloody eye–

a cinematic reference to the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein masterpiece, “Battleship Potemkin”.

I didn’t appreciate the film during my Russian studies three decades ago, but Eisenstein has a way of gaining in significance over the years.  I know I must provide more than incidental irritation to my lab mates when, without warning, amid the beakers and flasks I launch into a loud rendition of the hymn from “Aleksandr Nevsky”.  Sometimes Eisenstein becomes irresistible; I’ve already forgiven Paul Edwards (or should I blame the writers, Paul Zbyszewski and Graham Roland?) for going possibly a bit too far here.  I’m hoping my lab mates forgive me for singing, albeit with pretty good accent, but terribly off key.  Вставайте, люди русские,
на славный бой, на смертный бой…

But some of the reflections remind us of other events, more intimately tied to the parallel circumstances of sideways and Island realities.  I pointed out in “The Wounds That Heal Us:  A Cultural Analysis of Lost 6.01/6.02″ that Jack’s trip to the rest room to inspect the wound on his neck was laden with significance greater than anything occurring on the plane.  In fact, I speculated the true cause of Jack’s discomfort, and the true cause of Jack’s wound, could be found a thousand metres under the waves, where the submerged Island beckoned its great hero.  As the airplane passed over the Island, the spacetime disturbance caused sideways Jack to become spiritually and physically wounded, and probably caused the appearance of Desmond–possibly in some collective consciousness to which only Jack and Desmond were privy.  Jack didn’t look at himself again in a mirror until “The Lighthouse”, but when he did, the meaning was unmistakable.  Staring at his appendectomy scar, he couldn’t recall ever having had the operation, even after his mother told him he’d been seven or eight years old when it happened.  It didn’t make any sense to him.  Somewhere in his mind, he knew the surgery was much more recent, but he couldn’t figure out what the strange subliminal memories meant.

Mirror-gazing has become a dangerous preoccupation with the sideways set.  Sawyer and Sayid saw jumbled, fragmented images when they looked in a mirror in the sideways world–in keeping with their jumbled, fragmented, only partly-human existence in the Smoke Monster’s camp on the Island.  Tonight, Sun looked into the mirror and saw something–felt something–that didn’t make sense.  Maybe she saw or felt a place where she was at home in a strange tongue.  It bothered her.  Did she resolve, then and there, in the Los Angeles hotel room, to speak only in Korean?  Did her sideways convictions find reflection in her confident Island response to Richard’s plan to blow up the Ajira plane?

Indivisibility

The mirror images chafe because they reveal something unnatural, unreal, something divorced from the only things that can be.  The splitting of reality into separate streams may work for subatomic particles and solar systems, but not for human beings.  We are unique, indivisible, granted but one soul that is not affected by nuclear explosion or electromagnetic wave.  We are Faraday’s Variables, not subject to the rules of physics, but to the rules of the noumenon, to that which is transparent to physics and psychology, and supersedes all rules of logic and thought.  We are, in some way, necessary, not contingent.  In religious terms, it is said we are Imago Dei–the Image of the Creator.  We have inherent value, but also inherent existence, inherent unity.

We cannot be divided, and the discomfort before the mirror this season tells us that.  If Faraday’s Boulder has created physical instability, the spiritual instability is infinitely worse.  If physical particles prefer stable equilibrium, spiritual entities demand and unceasingly seek stable foundation.

There is only one Jack Shephard, and he has the same capabilities for reconciliation with son or father, on-Island or off.  There is only one Sayid Jarrah, and he has the same apathetic, inhuman tendencies, on-Island and off.  There is only one Sun Paik, and she has resolved to speak only Korean, on-Island and off.

The Bridge

Subatomic particles and solar systems have time.  They can wait.  Things will come back to equilibrium.  Whether the return to normal spacetime takes a minute or a day or ten thousand years is of no consequence to molecules and mountains.  The physical realm is content to bide its time while nature takes its course.

The spiritual realm has no such patience.  If there is a way to achieve unity, it will be discovered not through movement of particles and pieces, but through displacement of mind in space and time, though movement of unmoved consciousness.

One man is “uniquely and miraculously special” in this regard.

Desmond Hume’s consciousness violates the physical rules of spacetime to a degree unthinkable to anyone else.   While Sun looks at her image and wonders what is on the other side, Desmond jumps through the looking glass–mind, body, and soul–and is on the other side, in a different place, even in a different time.  He is a portal into other dimensions.  He can be on his boat, in bed, talking with Penny, and at the same time, crossing the Pacific, on a plane, sitting one seat away from Jack Shephard.  He is a time machine.  He will become the bridge between the sideways reality and the Island reality.  Something of overwhelming importance, something necessary to the Island, must be accomplished in the sideways reality.  Desmond will complete that task.

Zoe’s Hammer

The Smoke Monster is a creature of the underground.  The Dharma Initiative knew him as “Cerberus”, guardian of the gates of Hades.  All over the Island, but especially in the “Territoire foncé”, the DI cartographers discovered holes in the ground–vents–known to harbour the Smoke Monster.  They came to call these “Cerberus Vents”.

The MIB is not the only unusual entity calling the underworld home.  Below the surface of the Island, in several isolated pockets, DI researchers found regions of extreme electromagnetic energy.  They even found instances of exotic matter, otherwise unknown on Earth.

Is the contiguous placement of entities on the Island coincidental?  Does the Smoke Monster only accidentally and grudgingly share space under the Island with sources of virtually infinite energy?

I think it is much more likely that the electromagnetism of the Swan Station and the exotic matter of the Orchid Station are akin to the Smoke Monster’s powerful, ancient sisters.  The Man in Black is not powered by dreams.  His unstoppable force derives of sources close to his underground vents:  the energised holmium (or whatever rare metal Darlton decide to employ–at this late date we will probably never know, unless Zoe tells us) of the Swan Station, or the rare, unearthly matter under the Orchid, or all of it.  If the power source is interrupted, or diverted, or neutralised, the Smoke Monster will be tamed–or destroyed.  Zoe won’t do it alone.  But she will discover how to do it.  She is no ordinary geophysicist, but she will need help in mastering the Island’s super-physical forces.  Jack, Kate, Sawyer, or Locke–the real John Locke–will complete the work that she can only begin.

Final Victory

Victory will come at great cost.  Zoe will be instrumental in defeating the Smoke Monster, but greater enemies will remain.  Widmore may be defeated before or after the MIB, but even after he is wiped off the face of the Island, the greatest enemy will retain control.  He will not be defeated with hammers or hydrogen bombs.  Rather, he will be rendered impotent by humility, trust, faith–by the unshakable truths of our deepest humanity.  The Candidates will not stuff Jacob’s cork into the bottle.  They will make the Island into the place it was always meant to be, the place it could never become under Jacob’s warped leadership.  The Candidates will not replace Jacob.  They will remove him.

It is not so far to the Odessa Steps.  At the top, the Man in Black and his soldiers stand in long rows, rifles drawn, bayonets locked.  “A wise man once said war was coming to this island.“  Already the storm clouds gather.

Related posts:

1. Reconvergence: A Cultural Interpretation of LOST 6.08 “Recon” by Pearson Moore
2. Risk: A Cultural Thesis for LOST 6.03 “What Kate Does” by Pearson Moore
3. Siempre Juntos (Part II): Cultural Inversions in LOST 6.09 by Pearson Moore

Tags: Episode 6.10, LOST Theories, Pearson Moore, recaps&reviews, Season 6